Robin Lakes Rough Dance
It always happens when you least expect it. Dissonance, an evening-length work by Robin Lakes Rough Dance, was described in a press release as raising “the haunting images of Holocaust.” Heavy material to dance to. I figured it would be like watching another TV or film documentary, focusing on the issues of racism and the ugly possibilities of man’s inhumanity to man. The medium is never the message here, only a conduit for the content. Photos flash by and you’re horrified by their mute accusation, more terrible than any condemnatory rhetoric in words could ever be. Then you turn off the TV and eat dinner.
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But Robin Lakes has recognized the power of bringing photos to life, of reenacting images that move you. In the first section of Dissonance, we see the dancers in a series of split-second flashes of light dying horrible deaths. A man suspended on a wire is electrocuted in his desperate attempt at escape. Bodies fall from the flaming ovens into a pile. The images are powerful in their detail: we feel the man’s spasms against the fence as death throes, we feel the limp bodies stiffening into the contorted shapes only corpses could retain. Yet the images, however powerful, are too brief to be really moving–and unfortunately we’ve become immunized by the many books and films on the subject.
Suddenly, mid-smile, their dance is broken up by the grim realities of war and persecution. Lakes wants us to remember those realities, and where this dance is set–why, in fact, she created it. The dancers, seated right behind the barbed wire at the front of the stage, are suddenly close to the audience, using it as they might a mirror, silently howling out their pain as they go through their daily rituals rubbing and rerubbing a smudge on a face or arm, delousing hair. Frenetic and frantic, they are more than lost souls; going through the motions of life has become their reason for living. In “Remembering,” a completely bare stage gives rise to a very moving moment: a single spotlight highlights nothing. All that empty space where there had been so much movement, so many people. It’s an eloquent statement about loss through genocide.
